THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND

A Sermon by
James Ishmael Ford

6 May 2001

Mid week sometime I was standing in the administrator’s office with Fran and our Board chair Patsy. I was going on about how hard this Sunday’s sermon was to do. Fran asked, "what do you mean?" "Well," I said, "you know with so many things being honored at the same time. Five completely different things are being held up for us this Sunday."

Patsy asked, "what five things?" And I started to run the numbers: "One, our dedication of young Ryan. Two, our welcoming our new members. Three, our celebration of the Walk for Hunger. Four, it happens to be the time in the calendar when most Buddhist cultures celebrate the Buddha’s birthday, which was kind of important in my personal spiritual calendar. And, five…"

Well, at that moment I started to wobble. I hesitated. Fran and Patsy waited, I must admit they looked interested. In that momentary fog I seem to find myself within a tad more frequently these days than I like, I cleared my throat and said, "oh, yes, and we need to celebrate our wonderful Board chair."

I’m not sure whether it was Patsy or Fran who snorted first. But, with that extra moment, I remembered. "Oh yes," I said. "This is the anniversary of my being elected minister of FUSN, our First Unitarian Society in Newton." Five rather disparate things. Well, six now that I’d added Patsy to the list.

Truthfully, I didn’t think they gave me much sympathy. And I thought I deserved it. If you throw in our Woody Guthrie music program it could be argued I should have a hard time pulling this together. But, maybe Patsy and Fran were right. Actually, once I sat down at the computer I found it wasn’t that hard at all. In fact, I’ve been thinking a lot of late about how the mysterious activities of our lives, as unconnected as they might seem, do indeed draw from a single source.

This reflection is at the very core of my spiritual disciplines, my practices of presence. I’ve given a lot of attention to what that source is. As a practical matter I’ve been concerned over the last number of years with how each of our various activities, whatever they are, do indeed emerge from the mysterious one. So all these things, dedicating a child among us, welcoming new members, inaugurating a walk for hunger, celebrating the Buddha’s birthday, the beginning of my ministry here, noticing how lucky we are to have our current Board chair; do indeed, all flow from some common if mysterious source.

Actually, there is even a koan about this. Koan, as some here may know, are questions used in Zen meditation as foci for our engagement with the incongruities of existence. By taking the questions that are koan up and intensely sitting with them, and using them as opportunities for discussion with a spiritual director, they can become the vehicle for our own direct insight into the fundamental matters of our being.

On my own spiritual path beginning the koan way was essential to my finding some direct intimations of the greater mysteries. These old Chinese techniques for focusing and channeling one’s energy into a reflection on these essential matters are powerful things, indeed. I’ve been endlessly grateful to have discovered this discipline.

This need to understand the nature of our human condition, of our natural condition, has been the grand object of my personal spiritual quest over the many years. I suggest, however, for nearly all of us in this room, this is a common search. Sure, most of us haven’t gone into a monastery or spent our years being annoyed by Zen masters, or in my case annoying Zen masters. But, we have all asked, at one moment or another, "what is it about?" "Where do we come from?" "Where do I go?"

Koan distill these questions, make them points of meditation, and open doors for us to walk through to our own direct understanding. So, for instance, particularly relevant to today’s discussion there is a koan that notes "All things return to the one." It then asks, "To what does the one return?" All things; like, young Ryan, like our fifteen new members, like the Buddha birthing into the world, like Patsy leading us, like my call, like the songs of Woody Guthrie, like a bunch of us taking a walk in the heat to help raise money to fight hunger. At some point we, each of us, and each action among us, returns to the one.

Of course the list is in fact vastly longer, and seemingly even more incongruous. Each and every blessed thing that comes into this world, discrete and unique, at some point returns to the source. Our lives emerge, a flash of lightening in the dark. We love. We hate. We fight. We care. We birth new life. We die. We rise in the moment with flies and lions, with dust and stars. And we all fall into the same dark. So, what is that dark? What is the one to which all things return?

This is one of the great questions of the spiritual life. Another koan from the Chinese tradition covers much the same ground when it simply states "Each branch of coral holds up the light of the moon." That light, that source has many names. And we’re familiar with them. Some are inviting, while some are frightening.

God and nothing are both used one place or another by one person or another to name that same source out of which we emerge and to which we return. The poetic language suggesting it as the moon is interesting, as well. But, however we name that mysterious source, emerge we do. And return we will.

Now Unitarian Universalism, our own rational and broadly humanistic tradition has been of late caught up with what for us would seem a rather unlikely metaphor. We speak of this source as the interdependent web. Truthfully an outsider might find this a tad too poetic for UUs, who as a crowd were the first to embrace Darwin, and Freud, and scientific materialism.

The interdependent web, as an image, is right out of the ancient myths, and just as poetic and powerful as that of reflected moonlight dancing on coral. It recalls the Indian tale of Indra’s net, which describes the shape of the universe, and everything within it.

Perhaps you know it? Indra, the great Hindu god, decided to have his artists create a net. For a god, of course, it must be extravagant, and it was. When completed this net extended infinitely in all directions. But, to add to the splendor, Indra had a jewel of infinite facets placed at every joining of the net, also, of course, infinite in number.

Then, after it had been made, this infinite net with its infinite number of jewels with infinite numbers of facets, Indra threw into its midst one flash of light. The flash was instantly and infinitely reflected in the infinite jewels placed at the infinite number of openings of the net. And, for us most importantly, at that moment revealed the true shape of the cosmos.

Buddhists use this metaphor to speak of how the universe is at once one and yet contains everything within its multiplicity. This net has a lot, I think, in common with our UU intimation of unity that we, standing on our North American soil, so many years away from that ancient Indian story, and from our own experience, call the web.

We, again for the most part, are rationalists. We understand the web is a metaphor, of course. But this image is also very important to many of us, most of us, I believe. It points to something that we, most of us, understand from our guts, intuit with our bodies. When we stop and reflect, we tend to feel this image reflects a truth.

We emerge in this world out of each other, out of the stuff of the world. We are dust of dust, we are spun, scientists tell us out of burst stars, and poets tell us, out of stories, endless stories about intimacy. The web is a way of describing our experience of intimate relationship. As we consider this, it all takes us to the one, or if you prefer, the source, or as I prefer the empty, or as so many have preferred over the ages God.

This is important. Let’s not get caught in the strands of the web. That wonderful Unitarian Universalist writer Forrest Church reminds us how God’s name is not God. Each of these noises we utter are simply placeholders for that which is too much to name. Metaphors, pointing to a reality.

As it says in the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching, one of my primary spiritual documents, "Nameless it is the source of heaven and earth. Named, it is the mother of the ten thousand things." But, whether we find the temerity to give this source a name, or as I prefer to systematically dismantle each partial name, one after the other: the goal, I think, is the same.

The spiritual quest for the larger number of us is about finding the most intimate and knowing the great ultimate. The quest for God or emptiness or however we name it, is a significant project. I suggest it is a true quest for many of us. It is what drives my many years studying Zen; it pushes me to constantly challenge my assumptions, and to choose to crowd up with those who push me further and further into the depths.

As I’ve stripped away what I find to be less than the true, I glimpse moments of wonder and awe. Now on this path I also have long since discovered how the ego is very important, but also it turns out the source of my false sense of isolation. The ego, our sense of being an isolated self, is the great conundrum of human existence.

We rely upon our sense of self, our coherence as individuals, to make our way in the world, to survive. So, we need this sense of who we are. But, in some fundamental ways our sense of self as separate is in reality only functional. In our essence we are joined. And so to take up spiritual practices, or even just to contemplate these ultimate things, is to take us to moments when our egos shatter.

This can be terrifying. But don’t worry too much about this. While it gets shattered in these confrontations with fundamental questions, it has astonishing resiliency; the ego constantly reconstructs itself. The greater difficulty is remembering the connections, not holding onto our sense of isolated self.

The struggle to see beyond my constructs into the depth, into the great matter, God or emptiness, is something like the task of Sisyphus. Once the stone is pushed up, once concepts about what is are put down, the stone rolls back, new concepts emerge like all those glorious dandelions in my front yard.

So, we need to push, to weed, to see for ourselves, to experience for ourselves, the source. Then, naturally, that experience of the source vanishes, becoming a memory, a concept. So, we need to start again, to keep it fresh, to keep our insight lively and authentic. Such is the work of all spiritual disciplines, from Zen to our UU Small Group Ministries. Every time we look honestly within, we’re doing this work.

Now these are terribly important activities, I suggest. To thus engage gives us the perspective we need to live properly upon this planet. For instance, I think we use the word family much too lightly. Sometimes when we speak of our congregation as a family people are led to hope for too much. We are a wonderful and powerful community, and it is right and good to dedicate children in our sanctuary, and to receive our members with a little pomp and a great deal of heart.

But, there are two families only. The first is the one we commonly know as our relationships of deepest need. These are mostly of blood or marriage or like covenant. Now they are not particularly sane. We belong to family like we belong to nothing else, madly, extravagantly. Family is about those deepest, deepest connections.

And so, there is only one more place where that word family belongs. At least as I see it. Family also speaks accurately of our commonest relationships as creatures on this planet, in this cosmos. My best expression for this is to say we each of us are a first name. I am James. I see Patsy. I know Fran is in the office. Each specific thing rising in the world has a name: each chair, each bird of every type, each virus, each star spinning through the night.

But, we all have a single last name, a single family name. We need to know that name, and we need to own that name, and we need to act in that name. Whether it verbalize it as God or the void or the Mother of the Ten Thousand Things, it is our family name that we’re talking about.

Understanding this is why we have a hunger walk today. It is why we welcome children among us, it is the why of everything we do that is good and wholesome and caring. To at least have some intimation of this unity, of this family name, is critical. It gives us the sense of balance we need to act harmoniously and for the good.

And, that, I suggest actually takes us to the answer to the koan, "To what does the one return?" Well, here we are. As obvious as the nose on your face, don’t you think? The one returns as you and you and you and me. Today we’ve celebrated so many good things. And in a few minutes some among us will be walking for the hungry in our commonwealth, a wonderful term, I think.

As the Navajo say, we walk a beautiful way. When we know who we are, we can walk in beauty, we can weave beauty, we can be beauty itself. We’re each of us shining in the light of the moon. We’re each of us, as we see the connections, discovering our actions are all for the family. And this is a good thing. Don’t you think?

Amen.